Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [168]
Scott snapped without dignity, “You would have done the same to me!” and Lymond was about to answer when his gaze went beyond Scott. Stark-free of frivolity, his voice rang out. “My God,” said Lymond furiously. “No! You fool.”
For behind them, the column had burst asunder.
Scott, holding the Master’s reins fast with his own, saw that Matthew, the wily campaigner, had seized his moment. While the men around him, grinning, listened to the entertainment ahead, Mat had kicked his horse out from the others and riding at full gallop, disappeared through the trees.
It was easy to follow, and they did, strung out through the wood while Turkey crashed with unnecessary violence through scrub and undergrowth, his hands freed with the practice of a dozen similar embarrassments. Unluckily the wood wasn’t big. As the trunks thinned out, they caught sight of him, and Sir Andrew gave an order. A shower of goose feathers hissed through the air.
Turkey continued riding for perhaps a minute after; then he lurched forward, his bald pink head bewigged among the tangled grey mane of his horse.
Scott, his sword out and his hand tight on Lymond’s reins, worked both horses around and cantered through to the others. There he dismounted, and after a moment’s hesitation, untied the Master and let him get down.
Turkey Mat, pulled from his horse, was lying flat on his back under the trees, with Sir Andrew bent over him. As Scott and Lymond came up, Dandy straightened. He was rubbing a handful of grass between his palms, and they saw the skin stained green and red. “I’m sorry, Scott,” he said. “Whatever possessed the fool to do that?”
Scott, knowing very well, said nothing, but Lymond dropped like a shadow beside the heavy, scuffed body. “Mat,” he said quickly.
The tough, scarred face was twitching with pain, but Turkey opened his eyes and grinned into Lymond’s blue ones. The grin disappeared. “Did yon greetin’ wean stop ye?”
“No. I didn’t go. Mat, you damned senseless fool!”
The prone man opened blue lips. “It’s nae loss: I’d have been sweir tae see ye leave, and me with nothing but my big wame on my mind from morning to night. Tell Johnnie I got there one step ahead of his mixtures.”
“I will.”
“And tell the boy he’s a—”
“No,” said Lymond. “It was my bloody fault.”
“Aweel. I’m not for arguing,” said Turkey, and his voice suddenly was hardly audible. “If you get a chance at the gold, my bit’s yours. And the croft. Appin’s a nice place,” he said with a faint wistfulness. “But it’s damned cold in winter.”
And his eyes, moving aimlessly among the trees behind Lymond’s head, suddenly halted there with a pleased look, as if a sunny beach and a flat board and a pair of celestial dice had manifested themselves among the leaves.
* * *
Violence was the odour of Threave. As the rose and the rat and the whale and the beaver yield their essence, so the glands of Threave answered love, warmth and terror with dispassionate violence.
It was two hundred years old. Under the Black Douglases, the River Dee which islanded it had cherished blood as its native weed. Under the Maxwells it gathered to itself a robust bride; it cast its suggestive shadow on John Maxwell’s exchanges with England, and it let fall its mailed fist at random to flex its power the while.
When Hunter’s long train, with his disreputable prisoner, swept through Causewayend, forded the Dee and clattered into the courtyard at Threave, the reception, fremescent to a degree, gave fierce delight to Scott and allowed him temporarily to forget the raw episode of Turkey Mat’s end.
About Lymond’s sinful head, publicly exposed for the first time, blew the rages, the jeers, the curses and the gibes which had five years’ ripening to them. He sailed through them as white and insouciant as swansdown but, thought Scott, his emotions for once must be a little irregular—have I touched some pulse? Or will this sudden